Childhood

The character of a lustful person is fixed in the genital phase, the last stage of childhood development — that is, roughly between three and a half and seven years old. Having gone through all the previous phases, this one is characterized by the child’s need to find recognition as an independent being, a place of power both within the family and socially.

Although this character is fixed in the genital phase, there are also partial regressive movements that structure psycho-emotional and bodily defenses corresponding to earlier phases. By the time the genital phase is reached, aspects such as tenderness, contact with one’s own lacks and needs have been dulled, which ultimately become some of the core losses faced in the following stages of life.

As we see, the cost of having reached the genital phase is high and includes the construction of the psychic defense of denial, the desire for revenge, the lack of tender self-contact, and confusion and compulsion with sexuality, among other character traits. What is sacrificed along the way includes emotional contact, innocence, tenderness, and vulnerability.

As a general rule, in this sexual subtype — which is the most emotional of the three lustful types — all the participants in the working group created for this book are aware of an important and rich contact with emotionality at an early age that was gradually relegated to deeper layers, even forgotten, as the concrete clashes that formed the character occurred. This contact with emotionality gave way to learned behaviors as defense both of their tender side and emotional side against the perception of external hostility.

In this subtype, the fixation on possessiveness is the residue left as a neurotic form. In other words, from the parents’ side, there was no tender contact; it was a more invasive and confusing form of relationship, experienced as abusive in some way. And thus arises the confusion between erotic arousal and sexuality itself. So possessing becomes the substitute way the child finds to satisfy their need for loving and welcoming contact, when what it really hides is distrust in giving oneself, in reciprocity, care, and love.

When a person of the lustful sexual subtype shares their childhood experience, the most recurring word is survival. Surviving quickly becomes an urgent and necessary need, a matter of vital importance almost from the moment of birth. Either due to the perception of a hostile or violent environment in the family nucleus (whether physical, sexual, and/or verbal) or because there is no trust in being adequately cared for by those who should do so.

“Our home vibrated intensely: the hugs could melt you, and also a slap. Our childhood was full of screams, courage, and blows. Then, apologies, tears, and kisses. Love and pain danced together like very tangled vines. From a very young age, I learned that love hurts, and that to be safe, you have to dominate. That became my model to follow.” — Galina

“Our play was a task: working the fields, taking care of animals, cooking, cleaning. Love was measured by work. Working hard meant they wouldn’t hit you. Unlike watching cartoons, where you could get a slap for being lazy. I was small but strong. I carried more than firewood. I carried responsibility. My sister and I were hardworking girls out of love and survival.” — Galina

From very early on, the baby understands that being strong is the only way to go on: life is a territory where you fight or you die.

It is not unusual for people of this character to have experienced complicated births, in which a superhuman effort was made to be born or to stay alive, or to have had some experience in the preoral phase (from zero to three months) of similar characteristics. This may be an experience that, viewed symbolically, marked a way of being and behaving toward life: effortful, with a feeling of abandonment or danger of death.

Without claiming that this type of birth is the cause of the formation of the character, we can understand it as a symbolic experience of what the child’s subsequent childhood would be: effortful and with a feeling of abandonment and danger to life.

“At my mother’s labor, since I wouldn’t come out, they were going to do a C-section. They sedated her, although in the end they delivered me with forceps. I felt like I was dying and that I already had to come into life fighting. And when I came out, there was no one for me, because she was asleep and could not hold me.” — Leonor

“They tied my mother to the delivery table by hands and feet. They beat her belly so I would come out head first. In the end I was born with forceps and my mother told me that I started crying while still inside her womb.” — Gerard

“My birth was very prolonged, my mother was already exhausted, so I had to do all the work. So when I was born I was blue and my mouth and body were full of foam from the effort.” — Jesús P.

As the developmental process advances, the experiences that shape character begin. In the first stages, the child becomes aware that life and the people around them depend on — and who should be safest and most welcoming — are threatening and dangerous. Scenes where the adult is violent or aggressive toward the child, precisely in their crying and defenselessness — the opposite: protection, support, and tender care.

“I broke my leg in three places and it stayed broken for fifteen days because my father said it was nothing.” — Giovanna

“I broke my nose and arm in a fall when I was about six. When I got home, the first thing my father did was hit me.” — Jesús P.

“A girl hit me, and at that moment I saw my father arriving from afar, coming home from work. I ran to him to tell him what had happened and he hit me for not having known how to defend myself.” — Carmen

This forges a character that hardens. The childish part, with all its tenderness, innocence, and emotionality, is buried under behaviors tinged with self-protection, self-management, or withdrawal of certain aspects that could be subject to attack or mockery. The demonstration of strength and power becomes the only escape route from the violence suffered and leads to early displays of attitudes such as competitiveness, dominance, and vindictiveness.

Life is already understood as a hostile jungle where the predator swallows the prey, and being prey is not an option, so the primary thing is to avoid a possible position of vulnerability in relation to the environment. Specifically, this subtype makes exhibitionism a

way to appear threatening, as well as a means to hide pain, shame, and the intolerable state of bewilderment, considered symptoms of weakness.

Displaying the strong, proud, and powerful part is the way to repel possible external hostilities.

-“My father wanted to throw a pane of glass at my mother and my sister. First I told them to leave and then, when they were safe, I confronted him.” — Carmen

“When my brother and I fought, my father, threateningly, used to tell us he was going to give us a slap. I used to tell my brother: yes, a chocolate one. That eased his anguish (and mine), while I thought: if he’s going to hit someone, let it be me.” — Jesús P.

-“I provoked my mother so that she would hit me, that she would see me even if it was through beatings.” — Jesús S.

Given these events, the child begins to show behaviors seeking greater isolation and solitude, where they can find a haven of rest, relaxation, and their own safe space. A place away from the possibility of being attacked, from violence and from the exhaustion of being prepared to react to it.

In contrast, when the child has to go out into the world and relate to others, they learn to arm themselves with all the strength, security, and intensity they need to face a world ruled by hostility, where dangers lurk and must be confronted. Where the weak succumb, they try to show an extra fierceness that actually hides and splits off an internal reality where there is also a great deal of fear.

All of us participants are aware of a precise event in childhood development when the child can no longer tolerate aggressive or violent behavior and confronts the adult perceived as the aggressor. Here an inner, reactive, and intense force bursts forth as a defense with disproportionate power, very aggressive and omnipotent. As if telling the aggressor: “Kill me, or I will kill you.”

It’s a childhood scene where, for whatever reason, we need a parent to care for us, to give us loving support in a vulnerable situation, and instead what we receive is lack of care, hostility, and/or aggression.

Thoughts arise such as: “This will never happen to me again,” “I will never show vulnerability again,” or “I am alone in life.”

“From the shock of seeing my father shouting at me about something my mother told him about me, I wet myself. My mother laughed; I remember her sadistic, terrorist look. That’s when I said to myself: here (in life) I am alone.” — Jesús S.

[To my mother:] “Whatever you do, you can’t kill me.” — Irene

“When I was about three, I had surgery for a cyst in my throat. They gave me local anesthesia and my father promised me it wouldn’t hurt. But it did hurt because I think there was some problem with the anesthesia, and I remember him holding me so I wouldn’t move. That, for me, was a full-blown betrayal. I think from that moment on I erased him from my emotional life somehow, and I think also the rest of the men.” — Leonor

“If I had a cough, I did everything possible not to cough. And if I vomited, I’d run to clean it up so they wouldn’t scold me. There’s a lot of violence; it was worse to tell my parents than to endure the illness itself. It’s as if they couldn’t stand that kind of weakness.” — Jesús P.

We are aware of a crucial, turning-point moment in the relationship with one or both parents, when the weakness, the flow, of the aggressive adult (who may coincide with the one most admired and loved) is recognized. An internal association is made that the display of strength is what makes us invulnerable and therefore prevents us from being hurt again. Once this lack is seen, it is as if the position of a child (a figure in a situation of submission) is never adopted again internally. “You are the weak one now, and I will never be weak again.”

“I challenged my mother, confronted her. I thanked her over and over while she hit me and hit me. She said to me: crawl, I want you to crawl… and there I disconnected so as not to feel physical pain. Whatever she did she couldn’t kill me, I was indestructible. But then I couldn’t reconnect anymore. In fact, I sought that disconnection; there I was strong, invulnerable.” — Gerard

“My desensitization was trained. Something I repeated to myself over and over: I’ll do it better, I won’t feel… Until one day, at eleven, my father beat me badly and that day I managed not to feel. I had done it. With each blow I smiled and he looked at me as if I were a devil. And I felt like a devil. He ended up getting tired and asked me: are you done now? I just looked at him with contempt. I felt all my inner strength while thinking: never again. That’s how I learned not to feel. I needed not to feel. My desensitization was built.” — Giovanna

The hidden face of all this defense is based on brute force, denial, or self-convincing of omnipotence. This is the great desensitization, the reliance on one’s own achievement of

feeling nothing as a compensatory escape from facing the pain, disappointment, and humiliation received. Meanwhile, fear and sadness become encapsulated in ever deeper layers, leading even to absolute denial.

All of this subsequently manifests itself in a need and, therefore, a search for intensity in order to feel something, to feel one’s own life inside. The threshold becomes so high that subtle or superficial sensations do not penetrate; so, even if it is through physical pain, strong, intense emotions are sought that can be considered challenging by adults. This can lead once again to punishment or to distancing oneself emotionally, which is in fact the longing that lies beneath. All the experiences described so far of pain, vulnerability, betrayal, hatred, and fear are events that do not fall on deaf ears. It is a bill that the child is already looking for someone to pay. The desire for revenge in childhood is so strong that, even as a child, the idea of one day killing one or both parents, either literally or symbolically (disguised as behaviors such as despising, belittling, or being better than the father or mother and similar attitudes toward personal or professional authority figures that appear throughout their lives).

This fantasy is very present and becomes very real. The pain is so great that it seems that it will only be atoned for when the person who caused it is overthrown (killed, on a more or less unconscious level). Of course, it is a compensatory way of not remaining in the position of victim or vulnerability. A belief that by eliminating this figure, experienced as a tyrannical and invalidating authority, we will regain a dignified life.

“From an early age, I had already thought about how I was going to kill and bury my mother.” — Gerard

“My father grabbed me by the ear in front of my friends and carried me a few meters through the air. Later, in the car, crying with helplessness, I thought: if he touches me again, I’ll kill him. From then on, I thought of many ways to kill him.” — Jesús P.

In the shadow of this fantasy of killing lies the intense desire to die. Dying as the only refuge not only to cause pain and avenge one’s own, but also to find some peace that frees one from so much suffering; a way to remove oneself and to test whether behind so much pain there is any love, any contact with life.

All the hostile, violent, and dominant attitude shown toward the parents grows as a way of continuing to treat oneself internally and of treating other loved beings, as if aggressiveness crystallized as a defense not only against being abused but as a way of existing and relating to others as an expression of love.

A characteristic feature is pushing time to become an adult as soon as possible and thus achieve self-sufficiency and adult strength. As a result, the nobler and more innocent

aspects of the child’s inner world are fractured, broken, and denied, giving way to others such as rebellion and revenge, which will ultimately become the character fixations.

“My mother cornered me and started hitting me with a stick. So I grabbed the stick and said to her: ‘That’s it, you will never hit me again.’ She looked at me and smiled, without words. That’s when I began to do that to myself — I already have the jailer inside me.” — Jesús S.

“We hit the people we love the most. Even if it hurts me, it’s so they become strong, toughen up, because I love you and I don’t want you to be weak. I hit you so that someone else won’t hit you. We do what they did to us. We become violent, as much or more than they were with us.” — Various

Despite compensating with an attitude that takes an arrogant form and with a force and intensity that can handle everything and seems superhuman, internally there is a broken part. Behind this hardening there is an internalized experience of being a bad child, unworthy of loving and being loved. Over and over again we push situations and the people close to us to the limit just to check whether they will cast us aside or whether we are worthy of love.

“Because things hurt me so much, that’s why I know I have so much love.” — Giovanna

“I feel like God’s dog: I stay at the door. That way I have a place, a spot. And at least, if I’m God’s dog, I’m not the wounded child.” — Gerard

“What hurts is the relationship with love. That pains me; it’s very hard. I make people suffer with my way of understanding love; the example I had was very sad.” — Jesús S.

Childhood is a period of very deep, stored sadness and pain, which one got through with intensity, desensitization, and force. But, at bottom, there is a great fear of feeling again, of emotionally expressing oneself, because if that door is opened, one believes a bottomless pit will appear.